Autobiography of an Elderly Woman
by Anonymous
A few years ago my partner in the book business came home from a wearying excursion to a barn in Southwest Harbor, a small town in downeast Maine. Her car was full of second-round choices from the collection she had bought, books she had rejected the first time. Among them was the book you have just read. To me, her aging friend, she said 'This looks like it might interest you.'" Thus begins Doris Grumbach's Afterword about her discovery of Autobiography of an Elderly Woman, a book long out of print in a trade edition and written by a mysterious author. The subject of this "autobiography" is the onset of old age. The author calls to us across the century in a voice that is utterly convincing and timeless. Speaking just after the turn of the century - the book was first published in 1911 - the elderly voice rejoices in grandchildren, complains of the constraints that one's children and society place on older people, muses on the approach of infirmity and death and celebrates the motto, "as soon as you feel too old to do a thing, do it." But there is mystery behind this voice. Doris Grumbach explains her solution to that mystery in her Afterword: "Now, what about this cultivated, authentic-sounding, feisty old lady who, it seems, sat down to write anonymously about her life? Who was she?..